ASUS general manager says firmware-level access is the missing piece for full IT outsourcing

The boundary Shawn Chang describes is set at purchase. A managed service provider can patch, monitor and rebuild whatever the operating system lets it reach, and in the CrowdStrike event the operating system was the thing that stopped booting. The repair was the deletion of one file. Getting to it was the problem: each machine had to be started in Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment, and every BitLocker-encrypted machine needed its recovery key entered by hand, in many cases by a technician rather than the person using the device ^[8]. Chang's argument is that out-of-band management hardware would have let providers reach those machines below the operating system, at firmware level, and do the reboot and the deletion remotely ^[9].

"A deployment of services is nullified when you need to send in your physical device (laptop, desktop, mini tower, etc.) for patching, securing or fixing," Chang wrote ^[11]. His article puts average SMB downtime at between $8,000 and $25,000 an hour, counting lost productivity, missed revenue and emergency repairs, and does not name a study behind the range ^[10]. On those figures, one eight-hour day out costs a small business between $64,000 and $200,000 ^[12].

This is a laptop vendor making the case for better laptops. Chang is General Manager of ASUS North America, where he runs consumer and commercial strategy for the United States and Canada ^[1], and the 64% preference figure in the piece is ASUS's own research ^[4]. The commercial interest does not make the dependency untrue. Whatever a co-managed contract promises, the remote-recovery ceiling was fixed by whoever specified the fleet.

The adoption case is thinner than the headline percentage suggests. GTIA's 61% counts firms that outsource IT regularly together with firms that do it occasionally ^[3], so 39% do neither ^[13]. An annual break-fix call sits inside that 61%, and so does a full co-managed arrangement. The direction of travel comes from a 2023 Forrester Consulting study of 421 SMB cloud technology decision-makers ^[2], and the 64% figure measures preference alone ^[4]. Chang also writes that more than half of SMBs already use providers for cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, backups, helpdesks and daily support ^[5].

For a company with a refresh due this quarter, sequencing is the usable part of the argument. Specify the management capability of the devices first, because the service contract signed afterwards can only reach what those devices expose. The trade-off is a higher price per unit now against the cost of putting a technician in front of every machine in a no-boot event, and a firm with no in-house IT staff pays that cost in lost revenue ^[14]. Laptops already in employees' hands cannot be retrofitted with firmware-level access next quarter.